Information, tools and how-to's for the new intrusion analyst. Mentoring by blogging.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

IDS\IPS 101-5

Once you've determined what, where and how to deploy, and stand up your sensors, the real work begins. Once your IDS/IPS is up and running, the tuning phase begins (and never ends). If you're fortunate enough to be able to run the system in baseline mode for a couple of weeks to tune down the majority of the white noise, you can accomplish quite a bit using your trending or summary tools. Find the top talkers and start filtering out the obvious false positives that constitute large volumes of alerts. Lot's of internal processes can generate alerts that are benign, but look like events to the IDS, especially Windows networking processes. The IDS alerts themselves being forwarded to a mail server can even regenerate another alert for the same event, if you're including packet data (and the signature is especially broad in nature). Realize that once you've tuned your systems down to an acceptable level of alerts and feel confident you've about completed the process, you'll be doing this on a continual basis (or else see the white noise/false positive rate increase more and more over time). New signatures, additional network segments, new types of servers/services offered will all introduce FP's (false positives) into your system and will need filtered as they are identified. Your company may separate out the sysadmin duties from the analyst duties if the staff is large enough. For medium to small companies, you may wear both hats. I've found that's both an advantage and a disadvantage. The obvious disadvantage is that the more time you spend applying new signatures, filtering and tuning, and possibly even doing maintenance and patching, the less time you have to look at and analyze alerts. The advantage is that you, as the intrusion analyst, are uniquely qualified to make decisions or recommendations as to what traffic needs filtered, and what new signatures are relevant to your companies network infrastructure.